Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs Raises $1B for 'Spatial Intelligence' AI
World Labs, an AI startup founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, has closed a $1 billion funding round to advance its work on “spatial intelligence.” The company is developing AI world models for integrated perception and reasoning. The round saw participation from major tech firms including Nvidia, AMD, and Autodesk.
- Fei-Fei Li, often called the 'godmother of AI', is renowned for her work on ImageNet, a large-scale database of labeled images that was pivotal in advancing computer vision and deep learning. Before founding World Labs, she was a Vice President at Google, served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, and was the director of Stanford's AI Lab. - The concept of a "world model" is to create an internal simulation of an environment for an AI, allowing it to understand and predict how the real world works, including its physics and causal relationships. This enables the AI to learn, plan, and make decisions more efficiently, moving beyond simply recognizing patterns to understanding and interacting with 3D space. - World Labs' first commercial product, named Marble, was launched in late 2025. It allows users to generate persistent and editable 3D virtual worlds from various inputs like text, images, or videos. - Autodesk, a major investor, contributed $200 million to the $1 billion round and has taken on an advisory role within the startup. Other significant investors in this round included Fidelity Management and Research Company, Emerson Collective, and Sea. - This funding follows a previous $230 million investment in 2024 that valued World Labs at approximately $1 billion. While the startup did not disclose its latest valuation, reports from January 2026 estimated it could reach $5 billion. - The development of world models is a competitive area in AI, with other notable figures like Meta's former chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, also launching a startup, AMI Labs, to focus on similar technology. Google's DeepMind is also actively working on foundation world models.
